China issues plans to promote civil aviation development

China’s State Council issued (12-Jul-2012) an outline to promote the development of China’s civil aviation industry including creating a “safe, convenient and highly efficient” modern civil aviation industry by 2020. Details of the plan are as follows:

Basic principles:

Integrated and coordinated development: Coordination of civil aviation and military route, coordination between civil aviation and other modes of transport as well as regional development;

Adapting: Strengthen infrastructure construction, improve equipment and service support capabilities;

Innovation: Eliminate structural and institutional obstacles to maximise liberation and improving the productivity of the civil aviation industry;

Structural adjustment and expansion: Rational use of airspace and other resources to increase flight capacity, promote technological progress and energy savings;

Continue to expand the scale of air transport with an annual growth of 12.2% to 170 billion tons kilometre p/a and a target of air travel per capita at 0.5 times;

Steadily improve air transport services, safety and global ranking with a target of more than 80% flight normal rate and not more than 0.15 major accident rate per one million hours of flight hours;

Large scale development of general aviation with growth of 19% p/a to 2.0 million flights hours;

Aviation services to cover 89% of population;

Major tasks:

Improving the international air competitiveness of China’s passenger and freighter air companies by laying solid foundations for development and improvements at management level. Focus will be increasing capacity on long-haul international routes to Europe and North America as well as additional connections to South America and Africa;

Improve financial services for domestic airlines: Studying the establishment of the civil aviation equity investment (fund). Formulate and improve relevant policies to support the development of China’s domestic aviation leasing industry as well as encourage banking financial institutions to provide credit support in the purchase and leasing of aircraft, airport and related facilities construction, and support airlines’ listing an bonds issues. [more - original PR - Chinese]

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